Do you remember The Great Facebook crash of Last Thursday?

BEFORE I start today’s column, let us all bow our heads and observe a moment’s silence to remember all those friends who lost their virtual lives last week when Facebook was unavailable for 20 minutes.

Some people (appropriately I think) are already calling last week’s outage “Black Thursday” and the hashtag #facebookdown will live on in our timelines, a constant reminder that our freedom to write “WOAAHHHH” in capped letters on Facebook at the end an episode of GOT, just like life itself, is so, so fragile.

I remember exactly where I was the moment I found out my real-time connection with my vast and flourishing social network was cruelly and suddenly severed.

I was working at my desk when a colleague sent me a notification. And by notification, I mean he spoke human words to me.

“Facebook’s down, mate. No-one can get in”, he sniffed.

If Facebook had a ‘Dislike’ button, I would have clicked it as hard as I could.

Within minutes the news started going “viral” around the newsroom.

But like, really, really slowly. People actually had to turn and poke each other to share the terrible news. It took ages to get the topic ‘trending’.

I’ve suppressed much of what happened next (too painful). But I do remember my first instinct was update my status. This was NEWS.

What I’d write, exactly, I didn’t know. All I knew was that it would all be in capped letters, and possibly include the acronym “WTF??” It may have included the hashtag #FirstWorldProblems